In my travels through the PD forums, I've been printing off and corkboarding a lot of the funny/noteworthy/insightful/just-plain-silly things that I've seen, simply so I have something to raise my spirits while at work. However, as a more long-term project, I've been collecting some of the posts and discussions on here in the hopes of one day archiving and binding them in a book so that when I'm old and decrepit, and my eyes have long since become useless, gelatinous orbs that simply serve to shield my brain from direct-air contact, I will not be forced to squint at a computer monitor to read them.

To that end - and with everyone's permission - I would like to post some of the more noteworthy rants, stories and NaNoWriMo projects on here, so that there is one easily accessible place to find them for both myself and anyone else who would like to read them or contribute their own posts. Also, because I am a blatant whore when it comes to my own work, I shall post some of the stuff I have written for the sake of anyone who would like to laugh at my creative faux pas (sp?).

I won't wait for people to chime in, but will simply start posting with the assumption that everything (not otherwise noted) on these forums is kopleft. If anyone says otherwise, I will edit the offending post and remove it.

First entry: a rather weird little short story that I did for a Religious Writing class in college where the prof. asked us to "write a story about a religious mystery in Christianity." I thought at the time that the biggest mystery of all was what God, being immortal, did before the creation of the universe. The resulting story was pretty rough and only got me a B, but I like it.

Afflatus

By

Manta Obscura

On the morning of April 53, -2,000,000,000, a lonely yet amiable young/old God was strolling about . . .

I think I must clarify. When I say He was strolling about, He wasn’t literally strolling. There wasn’t anywhere to stroll in, really, because of the mere fact that Creation hadn’t been created yet. Or perhaps it had been created and just hadn’t been given physical form. Or maybe it still has yet to be formed and we are all merely thoughts of Creation in the God’s mind. Most likely, though, everything hadn’t been created.

All of that aside, the God was strolling about in an as yet undetermined way. He had been strolling/not-really-strolling for what would be, if time had been created at this point, centuries.

It just so happened that He was walking by His favorite part in the multiverse of non-Creation that day. From there He had a rather lovely view of the waves of Nothingness cresting across the Sea of Emptiness, and finally crashing against the shores of Desolation. The God saw all of it (or none of it, for that matter), but by what system of otherworldly sight He saw it amidst the non-black blackness even He wasn’t sure. He tried not to muse over it much, though. Even if He did, Nothing usually happened.

He was incredibly bored that day. Not that there was any day to speak of, really. There hadn’t ever even been the epiphany of the concept of day. In fact, there hadn’t ever even been the epiphany of the concept of epiphany, let alone the epiphany of such an epiphany as a concept like day. But if there had been, the day would have been considered, by and large, boring.

For a bit of fun He turned Himself into what one day might have been called a mongoose. The trudging boredom fled for about three anti-seconds.

If there had been air at this time the God would have sighed. It would have been a big sigh. If stars had been created, it would have had the equivalent effect of one of them going supernova.

Because He didn’t have much choice, He did what He always did (or perhaps never did at all): He began to just not stand there for a time that wasn’t an eon.

This was, needless to say, quite a dull and pointless preoccupation for a deity of all-powerful proportions. But still, He didn’t have many other options, so he continued to not do it anyway.

* * *

It has already been commented that the being in question was a God and was all-powerful. However, these two statements are a bit inaccurate; in fact, they’re completely false.

For one thing, a God is a being who loves all of Creation and wields an infinite compassion for what He’s created. It has already been pointed out in minor detail that Nothing had been created yet, so one could conclude that the aforementioned deity loved nothing. Actually, he probably didn’t even like Nothing, really, because it was a lot like Something that was bad, except sans the something-ness and the bad-ness. In any case, nothing to love = no Godship. QED.

As for the bit about Him being all-powerful, that too is false. He isn’t almighty, just massively, enormously powerful, which doesn’t really mean anything because there’s no scale at this point with which to compare Him. If, hypothetically speaking, Creation existed at this point and if, hypothetically speaking, one would have compared Him to It, the resulting simile is too drastically skewed to imagine. If, perchance, a lesser being had existed such as, let’s say, a human, and if this lesser being had attempted to challenge His power and authority, it would be to the same effect as if ants and black holes existed, and if the ant had tried to plug up the black hole with its face. It would be a lot like that only much bigger, more impressive looking, and a lot weirder of a story to tell your grandchildren.

The thing that didn’t make Him all-powerful, disregarding the fact that no base of perspective had yet been established with which to measure His power in the first place, was the fact that He a) couldn’t really destroy Himself, because there was nothing powerful enough to destroy Himself with, and b) He was unable to be rebellious against anything because of the simple fact that there was no structure greater than Him with which to be rebellious against.

All of this is really niggling and beside the point, though. I just thought you might like to know.

* * *

For countless periods of non-time He continued to not stand there. Even with the massiveness of His form which, of course, would only seem massive when compared to such nonexistent entities like a universe, He still seemed a small thing compared to Nothing.

It was sort of like comparing a toothpick to the cosmos, only entirely different.

Amidst the endless non-blackness He stood there, a single yet unmistakable pinpoint of Creation on the backdrop of backdroplessness.

(Chronicler’s note: It should be clarified at this point that when the God in question is referred to as “He” or “Him,” there is no actual evidence to say that the God was a male at all. This is largely true because of the fact that the mere concept that there could even be genders hadn’t been thought up yet. However, I’m an immoral, sexist pig, so I’ll continue to chronicle the God in question as being male.)

Despite the amazing and exhaustive list of possibilities that this Nothingness presented, after a time something, very stubbornly, began to happen. If crap had been created, it would have been scared out of the God at this point, assuming He had all the necessary organs to do so. The reason that this figurative reaction occurred was not because the something that happened was necessarily surprising; it was the fact that something was happening at all.

In all His existence in non-existence, He had never seen anything happen. Ever. There had been nothing there to happen, really. It was a lot like a Nascar race, only a little more exciting. This new experience, however, blew His celestial mind to smithereens with the thought of the possibilities it presented.

In fact, that’s just what it was: an epiphany of possible possibilities. Never had the God had an epiphany before; it was never there to have had. So in effect, having this one let Him have the first thing that He had had.

It’s not to say that epiphanies are in any way miraculous. Far from it, in fact. Given the statistical probability of finite possibility weighed against infinite eternity, it’s inevitable that every possible epiphany must occur at some point or another. No, there was nothing miraculous about it aside from the fact that it was the first anything that the God didn’t not experience. Before now, the non-universe just hadn’t been the non-universe, and that’s the way things weren’t.

But this time was different. With the first-ever epiphany of the concept of possible epiphanies, the God was primed for the epiphany of the possible concepts yet to come. Swimming there in His brain, much like porpoises at Sea World, many amazing things overwhelmed Him.

Reflecting back later, the God would recall the memory fondly: “Yeah, it was pretty weird, y’know? I mean, there I am, right, just not minding my own business, when out of nowhere there’s a somewhere. That crap will mess with your head.”

And so, with a mind full of existence, fit to burst like a frog on a hotplate, the God set out on the first endeavor He’d ever endeavored: He made. Dredging up His first-ever words from the depths of His first-ever body, He uttered the first-ever incantation that created the first-ever makeshift universe.

When He did it, it was done with a firm pronouncement. It was done with a loving, caring tone. It was done with a vague inkling on the God’s part that He’d regret it in the morning. With a thunderous roar like the splitting of an atom, the God’s voice boomed across the Nothingness. The Nothingness was pissed. As often happens, a whole cosmos sprang from just two words.

He liked them so much, He repeated them again.

“What if?”

* * *

It was said a moment ago that the whole cosmos sprang from two words. The cosmos didn’t actually spring, though. It’s hard to describe what it did, really. The closest word to describe what it did would be to say that it “qualallumed.” This word is an ancient, obsolete verb from the language of the angels that means, roughly translated, “to spring into existence as if from two words from the Divine God.” This doesn’t come much closer to doing the job.

* * *

Imagine an explosion . . .

No, bigger than that.

Still bigger.

Come on, stretch your brain; I’m talking REALLY big here . . .

Okay, now you’ve got it. Now imagine that this isn’t an explosion of fire, but an explosion of light. Picture, if you will, the sight of endless waves of brightness streaming through the universe to the darkest recesses of the cosmos. Try and envision the sound of Nothingness, vast and bleary, being torn apart by a raging torrent of photogenic chaos. Imagine that, from the tatters of this Nothingness, colossal balls of furiously burning gas are being hurled into the universe, in turn spewing from their titanic depths mighty orbs of gas and rock that tear across the heavens. Imagine the nebulae, the star clusters, the black holes, the novas, the moons and meteors, all of Creation exploding upon the now-black canvas of space as if Pollock himself had splattered them there . . .

This is exactly what the Creation of the universe was not like.

When it happened there was, in fact, no spewing, or hurling, or exploding, or any of that other unnecessary riffraff. What actually happened was beyond words. It was ineffable, indescribable; there is no poetry colorful enough in all the world to illustrate the Divine Artwork that was the beginning of everything.

This is what it looked like:

The black non-blackness that had once been the non-color of Nothingness began to drain away in silent ripples. Where once there had been mere Nothingness there was now a brilliant, somber shade of black. The black was strange, though. Though it was unquestionably, unarguably dark, there was also a quality of light to it. The pitch black radiated a sort of dusky glow that interwove onto and within itself, creating a darkness that was darker than black but infinitely brighter than Nothing at all.

When the ripples of blackness ceased and the dark settled into a comfortable sitting position, there came another change. Rolling over the horizon of Space came, at last, Creation. It was like a wave of dancing color that twirled tidally over the endless firmament, reminiscent in a way of what a kaleidoscope would look like when peered through with the eyes of an acid junkie or Andy Worhol. Where it touched the Space it left vast sprinklings of fuzzy color and glowing light that intermingled with the dark/light of the firmament, and the two miracle glows made awkward love across the vast expanse of Eternity.

Where the wave left splotches of color, there was movement. The tiny speckles of vibrant hues began to slowly spread their way into fuzzy orbs that were not unlike Furbies, only larger and more planet shaped. With unspeakably slow patience the colors wound outward, much like tree roots through soft soil or ink across a clean handkerchief.

When the wave of light and color had spread to an expanse that seemed a little ridiculous even to the God, it stopped. As a final touch to His masterpiece the God breathed, for the first time, on the still-drying canvas of the cosmos. His breath meandered across the expanse of the new light and color, and all that it touched solidified into reality. The once-fuzzy forms of the color planets grew hard lines, and the planets themselves began showing off their new physiques to their lesser moon-friends.

As for the light, well, when the breath touched it the light became, in a sense, more illuminated. This wasn’t the old-fashioned light of your grandfather’s age. This light was the funky, new, “see everything that I touch” kind of light. It was sassy.

And for days the breath continued its inexorable flow across it all and, to the delight of the God, it really was a period of days this time. He fell in love with watching it bring Creation into reality, flowing like silk on river water. But to Him it seemed to gush and trickle, rolling like the brightest watercolor down the edge of a perfect palette.

* * *

A very talented artist once told a reporter, “Art is life. It is the language of God.” Unfortunately, the artist was also reported as having said, “Urk!” when he died from drug overdose. Because of this, no one really seems to have taken his first statement seriously, which is quite a shame.

He was a clever chap, despite his perusal of recreational pharmaceuticals.

First, try to defrost the chicken using your microwave's "Defrost" setting. When that fails, get pissed off and set it to nuke for 2 minutes on 100% power.

Meanwhile, distract yourself with guessing how much spaghetti you need. Do not use a spaghetti serving measurer thing, which would be cheating. Start spaghetti cooking in cold water.

Notice that the chicken has become half-cooked in the microwave, and remove it. Start frying it in a pan for no apparent reason. Some people recommend you chop up the chicken pieces before you start frying it. Those people are wrong. Find something to season it with, it doesn't matter what. I used steak seasoning. Be sure to apply the seasoning after the chicken is at least halfway done, otherwise the flavor might stay in the chicken.

Dump spinach leaves into the pot along with the cooking spaghetti. Take care to use just enough spinach to add color, but not flavor. Add some kind of oil (preferably edible) to pasta water, liberally.

When the spaghetti is done, strain it and put it in some kind of container. Dump the entire jar of alfredo sauce in and mix it up. Allow it to cool while the chicken gets done, which would already be done except you put the heat on too low.

When the chicken is done, toss it into the mix. Taste. Decide it needs something else. Check the cupboards and find nothing. Find frozen vegetables in the freezer. Nuke the holy Jesus out of them for like 10 minutes, then throw them in there too.

Anywho, Rat quoted this from his LJ, which was posted on March 21, 2008:

Quote

Rant #00110010001100111 Little Children of Chaos have you read the Principia Discordia and "Illuminatus!"? Have you read Zen Without Zen Masters, the Apocrypha Discordia, and every other Erisian work you could find?2 Do you think that makes you Discordian? That you carry a Pope card, maybe a TSAR card, that you Turkey Curse your Boss and you know 230 ways to get to the number 5... do these things makes you Erisian?3 Open all THREE Eyes and See, Goddessdamnit!4 A thousand Fnords make not a single Discordian, 23's and 5's are not what turn cabbages into humans.5 No catechism, no required meme to learn. No "right" of passage into some Initiatory Coven of Chaos.6 Nay, my fellows, even that Great Goddess, Eris Kallisti Discordia herself, appears unnecessary for a Discordian.7 I implore you, Seek not only the Chaos of the past, for while there may be LULZ, while there may exist Inspiration, while there may be tools aplenty, it is not there that Discordianism lies.8 I do not say this to discourage reuse, older memes have deep roots and healthy growth and may be the hook which catches many minds in their initial first steps into the Void. And what is wrong with that if it be the case? Nothing, I think.9 However, Discordian 'enlightenment' (for what its worth), won't be found in those memes. It won't be found in anything written by Robert Anton Wilson, it won't be found in the Principia Discordia. They don't contain Enlightenment. They contain hints and pointers, they contain tools which can help with the freeing of oneself. But, words cannot free you from the Curse of Greyface.10 If you wish to be Free, then there is but one thing you can do;11 DISCORDIAN, ENLIGHTEN THYSELF!12 Another Discordian's enlightenment cannot bring the light to your eyes, nor will the ideas of another make you free.13 So you read a rant? Go write a rant! So you found some memes? Go create some memes! Do not rely on the Enlightenment of others for your own damned Enlightenment.14 In that direction lie all of the greyfaced, hunch-brained ideas of a Dogmatic and Drab Existence.15 I see no flaw in embracing and enjoying the ideas of others, as long as they do not replace your ideas. There is no sin in delighting in the stories of past Discordians, as long as you have your own stories as well. The only Sin is the sin of stagnation.16 Even so, if you do naught but parrot the old memes, you are still Discordian in some sense. Though, perhaps not the sense you were hoping for.17 A Discordian bears no responsibility to accept anyone else, not me, nor you, nor "Bob".18 They are only responsible to know themselves and accept it or change it as they see fit.19 And for you, it appears the same, for you have no responsibility to accept anyone else either. Including me, including this rant.20 Do As Thou Will, but be sure it is Thou who Wills it.21 In the end, our freedom is a freedom of the mind and only the owner of that mind can free it.22 We are the Slave and the Master. No one can free the Slave, except for the Master.

Let's say we live in a universe filled with trillions and trillions and trillions of cubic parsecs of vacuum, along with dark and illuminated matter. Let's say that we don't quite know yet how that space or matter came into being in our universe,but that clues are scattered all over the place,some of which we can discern now, others we'll be discerning later. Let's say that our consciousnesses came into being after said universe existed for billions and billions of years. Let's say that said consciousness recognized that it owes its existence to inorganic elements and molecules,that somehow those inorganic elements and molecules became animate of their own accord due to the fact that it had billions of years to turn into more diverse and complex forms, after all, our world is completely saturated with several constant energy sources,negating the effects of entropy on our warm and wet planet. Let's say that after, oh, say, 4 or so billion years (who's counting?), that that consciousness was able to look deeply inward as well as far outward,outwardly piercing the veil of space and view it out to, oh, say, 12 or so billion light years in all directions.

The universe is conscious of itself!

It knows it's alive!

Wouldn't that be awesome?

It's capable of reflecting on itself and saying: I have consciousness and I see all around me!

Le's say that man ascended (not descended) from an ape-like creature. That means we managed to progress from using straws to pick up succulent termites, to cooking Cajun Gumbo in, say, 4 million years.

Somehow, Christian theologians says that's a BAD thing.

Why?

Because it implies that we might be better than worms. And then they would be wrong.

I say we've made a really good go of it. Sadly, that's bad according to those self-made worms. They don't realize the awesome contribution to the universe that Man is. The universe is conscious of itself because of us and they don't see the magic in that. Simply said , their lives are devoid of REAL magic,instead, theirs is filled with supernatural battles of good and evil, sinning people, disgraced humans. How sad for them. They even say that we've fallen from some high mystical state where these two people frolicked naked and plucked fruit from trees in a paradisiacal garden,like uncivilized forest dwellers.

Where's the dignity in that?

There is no dignity in that. There's just no dignity in believing we're just "worms", to quote their terminology. Instead, there is dignity in learning that even tho space is as good as infinite, in all that infinite space we're alive anyway. We can yearn to reach beyond our atmosphere,and do it just about monthly now. We send probes into deep space and despite the seeming impossibility of ever being detected by another civilization, we keep doing it anyway . In the meantime, we're learning more and more of our immediate neighborhood. And the more we know, the more we come to appreciate our little chunk of rock called Earth.

But I digress.

My point is that at the most basic level we're all made of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen...the inorganic elements of DNA&,and it's ALIVE! That's very cool. We're made of the stuff of the universe. And what's even more awesone is that the heavier elements in our bodies didn't come into being until lots of stars lived, grew old and then exploded in novas and supernovas to form them. So not only are we made of the stuff of the universe, we're made of stardust! You can't get any more magical than that.

I prefer this kind of magic. This is the true miracle. Mythological beginnings are just that,mythology. They were good enough for beginning civilizations a thousand generations ago, but they don't work in a world where science and knowledge now has reign over superstition and ignorance. Science and knowledge don't make anything any less magic,they bring the magic of life to full view.

All things having been said, and repeated, and repeated again until the bile rises in the throat...now the only sensible action is to destroy the government.

The Capitol should be ruins, a grassy rock-scattered place where children go and their parents tell them, "This was where the bigwigs approved torture, this is where the fat men legislated their robberies, this is where they voted for war and left the poor and sick to die. This is where the ones in power proclaimed that all the money will go to the rich and everyone else can eat dirt." That's what the parents, those who knew and who put the dynamite under the foundations, that's what they will say.

And the children will pick dandelions in the ruins of Washington, DC.

Yeah, America's dead. She has been dead for fifty years now. Nationalists still love her, still kiss her dead lips; they are making love to her corpse even as you read this. But she's dead. Get over it.

Your allegiance must be elsewhere. Your allegiance must be to a new life. It is 07:30 and the October sun bursts in a flood of orange light through the window. What the hell are you going to do about it? Get the guitars and the djembes, the harmonicas and the fiddles; get your crazy trousers and your hat with the ribbons; walk on stilts and let the dogs run free. Dance for your life, you bastards. Dance and sing and work and fuck like you mean it. It's all that's left.

For fifty years money has been lavished on corporate barons while legislators deny food and basic medical care to the poor. For fifty years America has used lies to wage wars of aggression. The killings -- Vietnam to Iraq -- number in the hundreds of millions, a holocaust. A murderous American holocaust. For fifty years the US secret police have operated without restraint of law, and they have been set loose to imprison and torture at will. America's Constitution is a joke, ignored in practice and mocked daily by the actions of the government.

Dance like you mean it, brothers. Spit on everyone in power. I heard there was a man who said that no matter whether McCain or Obama gets elected the inauguration should be the same: a hollow-point bullet to the forehead. To be immediately followed by the execution of each and every congressman and senator. I did not say that, I don't know who did. It is illegal to say that, illegal to write it, illegal for an American to think it. (Just as it was illegal for a Soviet in Stalin's day.) I don't know who would say that.

Spit on everyone in power.

We will learn this or die: the only tribe is the human tribe. The streets and parks and fields belong to us. We own the sunlight on the grass, a bottle of warm wine in our hands and a cheap guitar hung 'round our necks. We own life. Late at night, alone: frost forming on the windows, a 40-watt bulb in the bedside lamp -- the one without a lampshade -- and a thin book by Jim:

"The bullet tumbled toward the girl's head at 1250 feetper second. She wasn't the president, you say,too young for politics. Despite theological gooseshitthe gods don't keep time in light years. We're slowedto the brutality of clocks. Listen to the alarm.Wake up."

That's it, then: wake up. Every one of us will die, but we will continue. We can't go on, but we will go on. The chain of souls sings in our blood, in the only tribe there is, the human tribe. There is a reason the officials are on top: it is because scum floats. And therefore be no respecter of government. Subvert the powerful. Mail your congressman an envelope of spit. Your allegiance is to humankind, not to the corpse of America or the stinking remains of a nationalist fantasy. Grow up. And learn to sing.

An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective [...] The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities. - Wikipedia

“Daring ideas are like Chess men moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game”- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Its hard to say when the “conspiracy” started. Because, the thing is, its not really a conspiracy. Its easy to trace people and interests, child's play really. But tracing ideas...well, that's another matter entirely. Some say it dates back to the Yellow Turban Rebellion, where Taoists eschewed Wu Wei and took matters into their own hands, collapsing the Han Dynasty. Others suggest the Assassins, the mystic-killers who controlled wide tracts of the Middle East, as more likely culprits. More realistically, the secret authors of the Rosicrucian Manifestos are named, setting into motion a fusion of Hermetic philosophy, Renaissance free thinking and opposition to the Vatican. This filtered into radical Masonic lodges, culminating in the exemplar secret society, that of the Bavarian Illuminati.

Others think that looking at the subject too politically may in fact be the wrong way of going about it. Looking to literature and art, we have Baudelaire and Poe, influencing the Symbolist movement, and working its way, via World War One, into Dadaism. From Dada sprung the Situationists and Discordians, among others. And from there, the ball was really set rolling. Discordianism worked an influence on the Church of the Subgenius, and combining with the Beat philosophy of the West Coast and their anarchic interpretation of Situationism, became the Cacophony Society. Neoism also arose, promoting its mixture of experimental art and pranking, paradoxes and various frauds. The avant-garde, constantly evolving to effect the mainstream and better protest against it.

And whichever story you prefer, including the ones you come up with yourselves, there is no denying that the virus is loose. Its hard to define, but that's why it keeps on living. Chaotic, anarchic, artistic and rebellious, opposing the values of the mainstream and with more than a hint of humour (if of the ironic and satirical kind) it is out there. And it keeps on going.

That's why this conspiracy is emergent. There is no controlling group, no command, no figurehead. Many of the groups within the conspiracy have these, but it does not add up overall. It does not even need to. And even better...with no one grouping, with no figurehead, its very, very hard to undo. Its in the soil, and in the air we breathe. To be sure, its hard to catch, or at least thinly distributed, but it is there, and combines with local and global trends to become something new, to change and adapt and unleash itself yet again against the upright, the “proper”, the bourgeois (in the pejorative sense) and in short, living the ideal of Baudelaire, that “the man of letters is the enemy of the world”.

Discordianism, for its own sake, its irrelevant. Well, maybe that's too harsh. It is not necessary, though its certainly very agreeable to my personal tastes and has done a lot in spreading the underlying memes that the emergent conspiracy relies on. Instead, if for whatever reason, Discordianism were to fail (the unlikely scenario of Erisian terrorists, for example), there are avenues for escape, to regroup, and continue on as before, with a few adjustments. The conspiracy, by virtue of the fact that it is not a conspiracy in the traditional sense, lives on, and continues to exert its influences.

The conspiracy does not die. It stands against the values of this culture, this society. Its willing to use unusual and exotic techniques to change it. And no-one can stop those of us in on it. Because...the conspiracy does not exist. But that does not mean you cannot join it.

Oh, and once again because I didn't make this super-clear in the initial post for this thread: anyone feel free to post insightful or provocative pieces that they find, if that sort of thing strikes your fancy.

I've been getting really into archiving lately, so I hope you'll forgive my seeming lack of originality in simply dredging up old posts.

We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his internal talk.-Carlos Castaneda

It's a Dream Within A Dreamwithin a dreamwithin a dream

The difference between a regular dream and a lucid dream is that in the lucid dream you're aware that you're dreaming. These dreams are more memorable. Despite awareness of the illusion, the experience of seems more real. In a lucid dream, you have control over what's going on. When I realize I'm not in the real world but in a dream world, I will myself to escape it, to fly away into a cooler place.

You can teach yourself how to have lucid dreams. To do this, you learn to make constant reality checks. Some people say you should try flipping a light switch on or off (notoriously useless in dreams), or try to read printed text. They provide clues to your mental state and can wake up your forebrain enough to take the reigns of your consciousness

within a dreamwithin a dream

See in dreams, your forebrain isn't usually working. Inside your brain, there's a lizard, a monkey, and a human all in competition. The human is winning, but only by a little. It's an uneven balance at best. In dreams, it's mostly the monkey and the lizard at the wheel. They hold up these images and symbols and memories and lick them and bang them on rocks and shake them up. Then we wake up and it doesn't make any sense to us because those other two lobes weren't trying to make sense. They're irrational by their very nature. When we dream, they drive.

The waking world is a lot like that too. People only use their human brain for a small portion of the day. The rest of the time the monkey and the lizard are driving. That's why people are territorial, that's why they get defensive, that's why they do the same stupid shit every day and never question why.

Now I'm not saying that the human brain is better or more important than the other two brains you have. That lizard brain keeps you safe. That monkey brain gets you laid. The forebrain - the human brain - is easily confused and conflicted. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's still very new - not fully baked. Millennia from now, maybe humans will have different brains, keener and more efficient. Today, we've got to try to make good use of what we've got.

There are times in my life when I realize that I'm in a terrible rut and it's No Fun. We walk around with monkey and lizard brain on, just doing things repetitively, ritualistically. These are the best times to make reality checks. This is the best time to ask "Am I actually awake?"

That reality check is about evaluating which elements of the rut are necessary and good and which should be stripped out. For me, the escape from the rut usually involves me picking up a new hobby, doing something drastically different, or in some way altering my day-to-day me. It's sort of like waking up from a dream

within a dreamwithin a dream

But instead of waking up into reality I'm really just waking up into another dream. Because that new hobby will one day get boring, and that new me is in no way the ultimate me.

See, it's not enough to be lucid briefly and say (for example) "hey, I'm miserable because I surround myself with morons", and then get new friends. You've got to keep that spark lit. You've got to shine its light on everything you do and think for yourself all the time. Upon self-examination, I've realized I have hundreds of opinions and attitudes that are borrowed from somewhere else. To some extent, that's the human condition.

People read movie reviews because they want an opinion about the movie before they even see it. People listen to pundits vivisect the body politic because they want to know what supposedly educated, well informed people are thinking. People religiously watch TV shows that they don't actually even fucking enjoy. There's a mass hypnosis going on here. The collective consciousness is standing on higher ground than individual consciousness. We're being blown around like leaves, and the wind is fashion, is politics, is culture itself

within a dreamwithin a dream

It's not just about escaping the rut. Learn to wake up, in general, and you'll become aware of all the parts of your life that are a dream. Learn to think for yourself and be lucid.

See I believe reality is what you make of it. All the parts of this dream are your creation. Think of something important. Think of something boring. Think of something exciting. The importance, the boredom, the excitement, all these things only exist in your mind. They're things you actually do have control over.

Once you realize you're dreaming, you can change your dream from a nightmare to a wet dream. Once you realize that, say, your morning commute is boring as hell, you can engineer ways to make it less so. You've just got to awaken your forebrain enough.

If you're in a nightmare, realize that it's a nightmare. Realize that it's YOUR nightmare. Realize that YOU are the one who is making it awful, YOU are the one who is dreaming it bad.

So wake up and change it - it's a false awakening, but an awakening none the less.

The point of learning how to wake up is not to find the top-level reality, but to achieve lucidity

when i was in 7th grade i had this crazy bible thumper friend that went on vacation and entrusted me to take care of his pet hampster, to which i agreed. I was always more of a guinnea pig type kid, but what the hell, how much different could it be? well....that little shit escaped his cage and got lost, and i frantically searched for him for hours. it in fact became so frantic that i was rushing around, and in my haste failed to notice the little bugger dart out from under the couch before i stepped on him. now, i didn't step on him full force, mind you. i was in my socks and i only stepped on him with my big toe. it was strong enough that poop came out both ends of him, however. I didn't tell my friend when he came back.this picture is now karmic consequence of that ancient transgression....

This is another whoring of my own work. It's a poem that I began last year at Christmas, but was unable to think of a good second half. A few days ago I reread what I had and the inspiration struck me:

Your possessions no longer interest me, neither does your fragile mental state. Your intellect has become stale and useless, wallpaper in the cage you call your life, a mere link in the chains you are to make yourself. Forced to do so by yourself.

Your friends/family/pets/rulers/employers are meaningless constructs until you accept the grim reality of this situation. Perhaps they are meaningless until they accept the reality of their very own imprisionment.

Now break down whats left. Do you really need your takeaway pizza every weekend? Would you really be a lesser person if you had a one bedroom housing cube in the shadowy part of the big city?

Discard as appropriate.

Now you have pressed the reset button. Feel free to add to your list again, but this time its not what you need to survive, its what you need to live.

Add your favourite art, scenic views and witticisms. Most of all, I suggest the quiet dignity of a free human. But thats only me, you are now in total editorial control.

Done? Good.

Now look around you. Does anything seem different? Do you really like that McBurgerHut down the road, the one you've been hanging around, inside and out, since you were able enough to say "I want!!" and point? Does the preacherman seem more, or less, creepy? Something never sat quite right with his fantastical tales of eternal paradise, if only you were "good" in this life. A life which, to the best of MY knowledge, is the only one you are guaranteeed to have?

Do you have any questions you have to have the answers to, answers that you know only you can find?

Good. Join the club.

This is a chainmail letter, you must now invent a way to mail it to yourself five years ago...

P.S. Have more fun, I can tell you it wasn't a barrel of laughs the first time around.